Report from Flight Operations Director Gerhard Billig on today’s simulation for next week’s IXV mission. We are simulating the full mission until end of splashdown today; so far TM has been received from Libreville and Malindi...

A few nice photos showing the Mission Control Team at ESOC, Darmstadt, conducting intensive launch simulation training for Sentinel-1a on 13 March 2014. During the ‘sim’ session, simulation officers (working unseen in a separate control room) injected...

The Rosetta flight control team are in training today at ESOC, working in the Rosetta Dedicated Control Room with the experts from the Sim team. They’re simulating 5 May 2014, when a manoeuvre is expected. On that day, the actual one-way signal time will be about 40 minutes; to facilitate today’s sim, they are ‘playing’ the one-way time at just 10 mins.

For months, the 60-plus engineers of the Gaia control team have been intensively simulating every aspect of the spacecraft’s initial journey to the L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth. The training – often running through...

Images from the intensive simulation training taking place today at ESOC, Darmstadt, as the Swarm mission control team prepares for the critical launch and early orbit phase. Experts from across the ESOC centre – including flight dynamics, Estrack ground stations and software support – and from the Swarm project team are also supporting. Access full image gallery in Flickr here